Tablet and Mobile

Archive for the ‘hdr’ Category

The subject of panoramas has always fascinated me – as a kid (I’m now 58) my dad bought me a Pentax camera for Christmas and that was the start of a very long hobby lasting years and taking in DIY film developing, joining a local photo club and generally exploring photography – hell, I even made a pinhole camera and made up large sheets of photopaper from the silver chemicals – try asking for silver halides in Boots today and see what advice you get. I can even remember some of the names of the nasty chemicals which if requested now might land one in a jail for terrorists.

Still, that’s all history and we do this stuff digitally now. I’ve had various cameras over the years from the full-on multi-lens jobs – to using the iPhone – quite an extreme range.

Why would I even class the iPhone as a “camera”? Well, one over-riding reason for looking to take pictures with your phone – is convenience – it simply isn’t convenient to wander all over the place with a large block of aluminium strapped to your neck – especially when it’s hot unless you’re a REAL enthusiast – I find myself doing this less and less – and so without realising it my “proper” camera has been relegated to the background over the last year and I find myself more and more inclined to making the best out of the iPhone.

I should clarify I’m talking about iPhone 4, the earlier models were basically naff as cameras. I’d like to discuss the iPhone 4s but my contract says I’m stuck with the current model for many months yet…

I travel – and my wife Maureen and I have a little place in Spain which we use as often as possible – I love scenery – always have and Spain has it by the boatload – but I think you’ll agree, breath-taking scenes look great to the human eye but once you get them on camera they are often usually a disappointment – normal photos just cannot capture the awe of nature – well, most of the time anyway (Life on Earth/Frozen Planet etc excluded – as Attenborough’s stuff is just, well, stunning).

I think there’s a reason we’re all moving to widescreen TV. Humans tend to look left and right, not up and down – no doubt that’s why the ridiculously wide screen cinema format is so popular. It just “feels right” – and panoramic photos take us one step nearer to capturing the excitement of reality.

Of course – one can go all the way and take 360 degree panoramas – they are just STUNNING – but not cheap to do – take a look at these…amazing.  Better, given special lenses, it’s possible to take all-round VIDEO that lets you turn around and look at different angles in live video… all of this will be common-place some day as now doubt will 3d (I’m just waiting for Apple to realise the potential for putting 2 cameras on the back of an iPhone and record everything in 3d). I prefer something I can stick in a blog.

For now –and for general purpose – I’ve spent some time looking at Apps for the iPhone together where appropriate with some PC-based man-power to help make better pictures.

If you want to experiment at making your own panoramas on the iPhone, I suggest you go grab the free Microsoft Photosynth and get out into the sunshine to have a play. Forget the fact it’s free – it’s brilliant. Look at the link I’ve sent on your PC – you’ll see lots of demos. The APP on the iPhone works a treat and creates pretty much seamless joins of separate images – even helping you to take them in succession.  It’s probably the best App to do the job.

What’s missing right now is a package that combines HDR and Panoramas – what do I mean by HDR? Well, the iPhone has HDR (high dynamic range) facilities – but they’re rubbish – the best I can suggest is that you get hold of the iPhone iCameraHDR app to see what I’m talking about.  Imagine taking a picture of scenery straight into the sun – it just doesn’t work – you get a white sun with no detail, or, if the camera is capable of stopping down, you get almost no detail in the scenery as the aperture has stopped down so much there’s not enough light coming in… you can’t have it all. Take a shot indoors with no special lighting – looking out of the window into bright light – you can have detail INSIDE the house or OUTSIDE – you can’t have both. The idea of the HDR apps is to take 2 or 3 different pictures, at different exposures and “merge” them together to try to get the best out of each.  It “kind of” works and the software can make the difference between a beautiful result or something that looks artificial and, well, crap.  How do we get around it as human beings with our own eyes?  Well, it’s not simple but our eyes do several things – as you look around a scene – your eyes adjust constantly – in a static photo that can’t happen – the whole thing has to be captured at once. Also the sensitivity of any part of your eye can change almost instantly – not as a whole – but individual parts (try staring at a coloured spotlight for a while and move away.. you’ll see the opposite colour because your eyes can de-sensitise even at the individual colour level). Again, cameras can’t do that – and to be honest the result if they could, might look a mess.

So one way around this is to use an HDR App to take several HDR pictures and then use software to stitch these together. It all gets a bit too much… and for PC editing there REALLY is not a lot out there to chose from – many packages are open source and frankly more hard work for less result.   But I have found ONE package, sadly the developers are not working hard on this – but it’s out there and available – Serif PanoramaPlus.  I’ve given you a YouTube link to their latest version but to be honest PanoramaPlus 3 is good enough if you can get it for under a tenner and there’s very little difference. Essentially what this package does is let you drag and drop any number of overlapping images into an area on the PC screen – press a button and…. you get your seamless panorama – and you know what – it just WORKS –  unless you’re really bad with a camera, no colour variation –it just produces absolutely excellent panoramas.

 

But here’s the thing – many panoramas suffer if there is movement because as the images overlap, which they must, if things move in those overlaps – you get a MESS… of course this can be fun – take 4 overlapping photos of a scene and have someone move to each of the areas before you take the shot. You can have all sorts of fun with this – the same person appearing several times in the shot.. but for some scenery it would be nice to think there is an easier way – and there is.  Take a video on your iPhone, grab some overlapping stills – bang them into PanoramaPlus – and there’s your panorama. It works well as long as there is no blurring of the stills in the video. Here’s an example..

The image above was taken in Spain – and covers over 180 degrees. I took a pan of the area with the iPhone  – and brought that image into my PC. I then used PicPICK to grab 4 stills from the video – and then dropped them into PanoramaPlus. All the panoramas BEFORE this (in this blog entry) were put together from stills. The PanoramaPlus is supposed to work with videos directly but it’ll not do iPhone videos hence the screen grabber. Any other method of grabbing stills will work just as well.

What about resolution you may ask?  If I told you that the original of that image you see above is nearly 6,000 pixels wide – is that high enough resolution? And yes, that was done with the iPhone 4 standard video camera.

That little outcrop of white buildings over to the left.. here there are at the original resolution. Not too shabby…

Here (below) is a screenshot of the PanoramaPlus software in action. Incidentally not only can you fire a bunch of left-right overlapping images – but up-down as well.  Standing in front of some great architecture, FAR too close to get the whole lot in one photo? No problem, take a bunch of overlapping photos and fire the lot in any order at this software and it will do the business for you. As you can imagine this is FAR, FAR more than simply overlapping some photos – the images have to be matched for colour and brightness and the software has to warp each image to make them “fit” as a whole – and somehow it DOES – usually in seconds, automatically, no intervention, no problem. I’ve taken 15 or more images of something and fired them into PanoramaPlus and it’s turned out a respectable result.

The software is DEAD easy to use and you have all sorts of control over the output – you can even generate panoramas ready to drop into a web page.  Check out the links I’ve given you and have fun experimenting. And yes, it’s CHEAP.

Here are a couple of other panoramas I made last year with this software (but using a standard SLR camera as I didn’t have the iPhone 4 at the time). Try clicking on these images to see higher-resolution versions….

Enjoy experimenting.

Recently made available (Wednesday 8th Sept) the new iPhone operating system upgrade IOS4.1 has something for everyone, apparently. For those souls unfortunate enough to have the new iPhone 4, the operating system will bring new HDR features but you’ll still need that band around your phone – not that most people know what HDR means (but will by the end of this blog)… fear not, there’s “an app for that” for the rest of us.

The operating system upgrade to IOS4.1 also features various fixes and speed improvements.  See the Apple store if you want more info – no point in me repeating it here…  though the details on the site are a bit vague at the time of writing, strange considering they’ve now released the upgrade.

Apple won’t make a big deal about the fact that they’ve also taken the opportunity to plug another hole which up to now allowed jailbreaking of the phone – which you may recall was recently made legitimate! However if you’re not planning on jailbreaking the iPhone, that won’t bother you. I could not see sufficient justification given the rather motley selection of apps in the CYDIA store, so I went for the upgrade.

For those of you who’ve never updated their iPhone – it’s a doodle, just make sure the phone is charged, follow the instructions, be patient and you’ll soon be in new operating system heaven – OR you’ll own a BRICK if it doesn’t work. In my case I plugged my iPhone into the PC, ignored the message about backing up etc… and pressed the update button…  I got a notice on the screen….

and 11 minutes later… and another glass of wine down the hatch… the iPhone insisted on doing a backup which I was convinced was going to take weeks given that I have hundreds of Apps on there – but no, it took only a few minutes. As I was sitting praying for no power cuts, the software effortlessly backed up everything, then upgraded the phone with a few beeps here and there but very little else to indicate that the phone was having a lobotomy.

As I watched, the phone reset (always a worry) and a minute later the PC said “updating the phone software” as a little progress bar on the iPhone moved slowly from left to right assuring me I hadn’t converted my phone into a brick…I’m guessing 5 minutes in total during which I was more tense than during an episode of “24”.

At the end of the upgrade my heart almost stopped when I heard the cheersome “beepBEEP” which indicated that the iPhone was ALIVE AND WELL.

Oh, I should say I was updating from 4.01 to 4.1 – I missed out the intermediate update as it really didn’t offer much except plugging another leak.  You have to hand it to Apple, they do make the updates rather easy and seamless.

I checked the phone – and iTunes to ensure everything was ok. I’m still working on this one…

This is a worry, as it’s a 16Gig phone – on the other hand it says I’ve only used a couple of hundred meg which is rubbish – TomTom uses more than that… so I’m not particularly worried that I have nearly 7 gig left… here’s the important bit…

and on power-up the only thing that’s immediately obvious is… the new GAME CENTRE (or CENTER as some might say).

Other than that, things look pretty much like normal – it would be nice if they’d introduce a little pop-up guide to what’s new. Anyway… that’s it – job done! Rumour has it that 4.2 will be available on the IPAD in November! Maybe they’ll fix the naff WIFI locating software.

Ok, so what about the 3GS users left with no HDR and what on EARTH is HDR anyway?

HDR is not hi-definition as someone suggested today but high dynamic range.

Those of you with long memories may remember cassette tapes – which had low dynamic range (bear with me on this).  At one end of the range, quiet sounds could be drowned out by hiss – at the other end if you recorded too loudly, the sound would distort. Along came CDs and all of that became history, you could now have from the quietest whisper to the loudest bang. Problem solved, no-one even thinks about it any more (except that lots of people still use such rubbishy loudspeakers that it’s all fairly academic and those of us over 50 can only hear half of the notes anyway – my hearing USED to go to around 19Kz, it’s now stone dead above 12Khz).

But we’re still there with cameras – the dynamic range of many phones is TERRIBLE…  so – what does this mean? Look at any scene say with buildings and the sun behind them… your eyes can see all the building details – and with a little effort, the sun. Point your camera at the same scene… you will have an exposure choice of getting the SKY detail with the buildings too dark – or the buildings with a whitened-out sky…  this is one example, there are many.. the fact is the camera just can’t handle the RANGE of brilliance.

So how to get around that… well, the BEST answer would be to have sensors that can handle everything from the dimmest light output to the brightest star – sadly the only ones which do that cost obscene amounts of money and usually sit in space telescopes… getting this on our mobiles phones? Not a chance, for now.

Another way (though it has it’s issues) is to take TWO or more shots at different exposures, one set for the sky, the other set for the buildings in this case, then somehow MERGE the two images taking the best of both. USELESS for fast moving scenes but EXCELLENT for your static shots – not entirely AUTHENTIC but really good looking.

THAT is what the new iPhone will do – and you can get a PRETTY close approximation on the 3GS for the staggering price of under 2 QUID. The APP is called PRO HDR, it does the lot automatically, I don’t work for them, I’ve tried the rest and they don’t do the job well  -this does… so if you want HDR pics on your “old” 3GS phone – there’s your answer.

So on the left, what you’re looking at is a pair of photos the software took automatically at Kings Cross in London… the TOP photo shows the rather grim skyline in September… with some detail in the clouds – but the building – well, nothing. The SECOND photo shows the building – but the sky is totally whitened out. I should say I did NOT do this manually, the PRO HDR software did this totally automatically.

The result, well judge for yourself… personally I’m WELL impressed. Not that sharp as my hand was shaking like a food mixer in the crowd when I took the shot – but notice  – full detail in the building – full detail in the clouds… that’s what you can look forward to with your iPhone be it the new or the old!

 

Update: 11/09/2010

Just as I was about to scrap the older TrueHDR on my iPhone in favour of ProHDR, along came an UPDATE – and guess what – they now automatically take THREE pictures in a row-  the ONE thing that was wrong with that package. So now there are TWO options for HDR lovers.

If you take a look at the photo on the right, normally with two bright screens the background would be utterly black… and without the screens you’d have a choice of seeing the inside or some detail outside. In this shot, you see all three together, just as your eyes would have it. This was taken using the TrueHDR package.

I hope this is helpful, if you find anything better do let me know. If you want to follow my interest, you could do worse than follow @scargill

 

Regards

 

Peter Scargill